Marine One

'The United States government has determined what the cause is, even if it's preliminary, the first lady has asked for compensation, and WorldCopter, the company that killed the president, is stonewalling. That's what he's going to sell. You understand that?'

'Yes, ma'am, I do. We can only do so much and at a certain pace. The NTSB's findings are flawed, and we're working on the cause. I think they may have it completely wrong. I just can't prove it yet.'

'What was his demand?'

'One billion dollars.'

She couldn't hide her surprise. 'For seven wrongful death cases? Even if one of them is the president. I guess it depends on how much you project a retired president would make, but I would think these cases altogether can't be worth more than one hundred or one hundred fifty million dollars.' She frowned. 'It's amazing how many cases resolve when you force them to go to trial. And I mean force. Motions for continuing trials are denied. Judge Baxter denied one last week even though one of the attorneys had a death in the family. He put in the order that it was sad, but the attorney wasn't the lead attorney and the death wasn't from her immediate family.' Norris smiled. 'So these dates are written in stone. And I expect Judge Betancourt will have no interest in dragging this out. A circus is bad enough. A circus that goes on too long is much worse. You do understand that?'

'Yes, ma'am,' I said.

The magistrate stood up and walked toward the door. 'I will now speak with Mr. Hackett and see if I can encourage him to approach you with a new settlement demand. I don't expect him to. I do not think this trial will benefit the country or heal the wound that is currently bleeding. But I believe he thinks the fact the wound is open and hurting is better for him. I will try to dissuade him of that notion.' She looked up as she put her hand on the door before we went out into the courtroom. 'Mr. Nolan, if you think that you can find the cause of the accident that differs from the NTSB's preliminary conclusion, I'd suggest you find it very quickly. If this case goes to trial, it is going to be the biggest case in the history of our civil court system. Don't let that happen.'

The next morning at six thirty I met Tinny at the Blue Mug, a coffee shop I knew by the waterfront. I went with some trepidation-he said he was bringing a 'friend.' I didn't know what to make of that. Byrd scared me. He dug stuff up and found people that I had no idea where they'd come from or how he'd done it. But he had saved my ass several times. This time, much to my surprise, he brought someone I had already spoken to: Jason Britt. They were waiting for me when I arrived. I shook Tinny's hand and then Britt's as I said to him, 'What the hell are you doing here?'

I looked at Tinny, who was controlling a smile. He said, 'Let's get some coffee. I had to leave at an ungodly hour to get here.'

'I thought you didn't want to meet in public.'

'Nah, we're early. It's cool.'

We ordered and sat at the table in the front that looked through the windowpanes over the water. Byrd said, 'So I asked Britt here what you talked about and he told me. You left a lot of things unasked, Nolan. As usual. So I started over. He told me some things that I think you ought to hear. Some more things about your boy Collins.'

I looked at Britt, who looked a little bit uncomfortable but also excited. It's funny how some people respond to being a witness in a big case. A lot of people run the other way. They want nothing to do with testifying. Others respond in exactly the opposite way. Suddenly they're the center of attention. Suddenly everybody hangs on every word. Everybody wants to know what they think. They'll be called in a trial and be on world television. Some people love that. It's a problem because it can affect their testimony. It can make them bend the truth or embellish it, so that they are more interesting, or in demand, or, worse, more notorious. Some witnesses even imagine themselves being so popular and in demand that after 'this is all over,' as they all say, they'll write a book about it. They actually believe that they will have an audience for a book that they will write about what they know. They're almost certainly wrong about that, but they believe it in their hearts. So when a witness suddenly grows interested in testifying voluntarily and wants to let you know things that they remember differently from what they had told you at the initial interview, I'm always wary. But I knew Britt wasn't going to make things up. He'd buff a fact here or there to make it look a little better or different in his story, but he wouldn't make it up.

I said to Britt, 'He threaten you? Bribe you? How did he get you into this? You about hung up on me last time.'

Britt smiled. 'No, he just started asking me a bunch of questions, one Marine to another. He was looking at something, I'm not sure what, maybe like his CV or something. He knew a lot about Collins already and just started asking me if I knew anything about when Collins was here, and when Collins was there.'

I nodded. 'So he stimulated some memories?'

'Not so much a memory as something that I heard.'

'What'd you hear?'

Britt sat forward and leaned on the iron table with his elbows so he could not be overheard. Not that anyone else was around; we were the first people there. 'Well, Mr. Byrd here asked me if I knew anything about Collins's Purple Heart. I had forgotten he had a Purple Heart.'

'Is that from Desert One?' I asked.

'No. That's the thing. He wasn't wounded in Desert One. This was from the time he was the executive officer of a forty-six squadron in Iraq. During the siege of Fallujah.'

I didn't even know Collins had a Purple Heart from Falluja. I was all ears. 'What happened?'

'Well, you know how there's sometimes the official version, and then there's the other version?'

'Sure.'

'Well, the official version is that Captain America was flying forty-sixes under fire evacuating wounded Marines. Took a severely wounded Marine out of a combat zone and while flying away took an AK-47 round right in the jaw. Bleeding like a stuck pig, he continued to fly, got his wounded Marine to the aid station, where he checked him in and was admitted himself, then later was flown to Germany for surgery.'

'And what's the real story?'

'The real story is that the week before he got shot, he had braced up a Marine captain for flying through a prohibited zone to get a wounded Marine back to the base in time to save his life. If he'd gone around, the guy probably would have died. That didn't matter to Collins. The standing order was what mattered. You didn't fly through the prohibited zone no matter what. It endangered one of his precious thirty-year-old helicopters.

'All the other pilots in the squadron thought Collins was out of his mind. The captain's helicopter took a few rounds, but nobody got hurt. Collins went postal, but the other pilots in the squadron thought Collins should put the guy in for a medal. Collins refused. Said he was lucky not to be brought up on charges for violating the standing order. So, get this, the ground troops, the battalion from where the guy was rescued, they put the captain up for a medal.

'Then, the very next week, Collins himself is flying through the prohibited zone. No call for medevac, he's just tooling around flying through the zone like John Wayne 'cause he feels like it. And he gets shot in the face and his crew chief gets shot in the leg. Collins flies himself to the medical evacuation and puts himself in for a Purple Heart and for an Air Medal. The Air Medal didn't go anywhere 'cause everybody knew what had happened, but he got the Purple Heart because he was 'wounded in action.'

'He went to Germany for facial surgery, where they did a partial jaw replacement with a titanium jawbone. He got sent back to his squadron while it was still in Iraq. So behind his back everybody started calling him T-Jaw. His officers were not impressed, and they thought he was a complete self-promoting jerk. From what I understand, that kind of conduct was pretty typical.'

I was stunned. I had never heard this story. Talk like this got around in the Marine Corps. 'How is it I've never heard this before?'

Britt shrugged. 'Probably people were a little wary of passing it on. It could have torpedoed his career. Marines love bravery, they love real men. They love taking one in the chest for the Corps. But what they hate, as you well know, is a self-serving, self-promoting asshole who is only looking out for his own career.' Britt took a deep drink from his coffee. 'People didn't know for sure what had happened. Nobody was really there except for a couple of people. It was virtually impossible to sort it out. But I heard it. Always in the superhushed 'promise not to tell anybody' kind of talk. But I heard it from a couple of sources. I don't know if it's true, but that's what I heard.'

'How did the people who were checking out his background for his job flying Marine One-how did they not hear about this?'

'They may have, they may have given him the chance to answer it. Maybe he had a good explanation, maybe he said that the rumor was started by other Marine pilots who were envious, who thought he'd gotten promoted too quickly above others. Maybe he wasn't outside the flight area and someone just tacked that onto the story to bang him for the way he treated that captain. Don't know. Lots of possibilities. You know how that can start. Someone thinks you're bypassing them in the promotion ranks? It's not unheard of that they'll start a false rumor.'

'So which is it? Was it a false rumor or did that happen? Is T-Jaw a fraud?'

Britt shrugged. 'I don't know, I'm just telling you what I heard.'

I looked at Byrd, who was staring at Britt. I asked him, 'What do you think, Tinny?'

'Beats the hell out of me. I just thought you should hear what the man had to say. But I tell you what. The more I learn about this guy, the more cracks I see in the marble statue.'

I stood up and Britt followed me to his feet. 'Thanks for coming down. You didn't have to come all this way.'

'No, I had to meet with a subcontractor based here. It's no problem.'

He walked to his car and drove off as Byrd and I sat back down. The sky was a bright blue with golden morning sunlight illuminating the city. We could hear the lanyards of the moored sailboats two blocks away slapping against their masts as they rocked with the incoming tide.

'Tinny, I think we have to keep digging.'

'I'm deeper than you know.'

'One thing continues to haunt me here.'

'What's that?'

'Why the hell was the president going to Camp David?'

Byrd nodded as he tossed his cup away. He zipped up his leather valise and said, 'You know I'm already on that. That's one of the things that's a little bit deeper. I haven't hit the wood of the buried chest yet, but my shovel's getting close to the lid.'

'How do you know there is a chest, how do you know there's a lid at all? How do you know it wasn't just some poker game with a bunch of school buddies?'

'Or strippers.'

'Oh, right. The president was risking his life to fly to a stag party. Come on.'

'Something big was happening. I'm talking to that other Marine. Boy from the Secret Service.'